Back to the morning walk today, though it was chucking it down until about five minutes before I left. That meant everything was sparkling with raindrops, a rainbow led me down to the beach and my trousers got quite damp. But it was a beautiful morning.
ON DECK: A solid 1,440 words on PROJECT DRIFT this morning, now that the proofs are handed back in for SOLITARY AGENTS. It's been a couple of weeks since I last touched this story (a week off, then a week working on the proofs) so it took me a minute to get back into the swing of it, but I'm enjoying drafting again. I'm closing in now on 150k words drafted for the year so far, but I won't finish this draft this year without some kind of Herculean effort. And in any case there's enough other potential work lurking out there in the offing (edits on another contracted book, potentially another draft I'll need to start) that this project will just bimble along, filling the gaps between other work, for the foreseeable.
LISTENING: A great interview with Abir Mukherjee about his new book THE BURNING GROUNDS, over on Quick Book Reviews.
WATCHING: We started CELEBRITY RACE ACROSS THE WORLD yesterday. This show is so good that even the celebrity version is worth watching. I love it.
READING: More of THE POWER OF THE DOG yesterday. There's two or three distinct plot lines and character arcs that have yet to intersect and I'm fairly sure when they do it's going to get messy.
LINK: I really enjoyed this piece from The Honest Editor talking about money in publishing. I particularly liked that it didn't simply rehash the very common 'this is how an advance works' stuff you see a lot of and instead dug a bit into how P&Ls and different costs work at the business level. Very useful stuff.
UP NEXT: Drafting until told otherwise, for the rest of the year. As noted I've got a few things lurking at the perimeter that may need to be picked up any time between now and the end of the year, but in the interim I'm going to keep pushing ahead with DRIFT and see if I can crack 5-8k per week.
I'm also prepping for an event this coming Saturday, where I'll be attending the first Book Blether at Denny Library near Falkirk, along with authors Marion Todd and Kate Foster.
I'm really looking forward to it, as it will be my first library event.
In the meantime though - typing. Onward!